Critical Essay by Jane S. Carducci

In the following essay, Carducci focuses on the language of Titus Andronicus, and maintains that the play demonstrates "the failure of the Roman masculine ideal. "

My grief lies all within, And these external [manners] of laments Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.

(Richard II, IV. 1.295-8)

Although Titus Andronicus (c. 1594) was popular until at least 1620, today it is one of the least frequently produced of Shakespeare's plays.1 Like its predecessor, the Senecan revenge tragedy, this melodrama offers an unhappy ending, accumulated horrors, and long, didactic speeches in a florid and rhetorical style. Though it follows the Senecan tradition of bombast and brutality, Titus is especially savage. Indeed, as T. S. Eliot...